we know all this, but the photo is great

In a column mocking the political ignorance of the “dumbed-down” Pindo sheeple and lamenting the death of “objective fact,” NYT columnist Timothy Egan shows why so many Pindosis have lost faith in the supposedly “just the facts ma’am” mainstream media. Egan states as flat fact:

If more than 16% of Pindosis could locate Ukraine on a map, it would have been a Really Big Deal when Trump said that Russia was not going to invade it, two years after they had, in fact, invaded it.

But it is not a “fact” that Russia “invaded” Ukraine, and it’s especially not the case if you also don’t state as flat fact that Pindostan has invaded Syria, Libya and many other countries where the Pindosi government has launched bombing raids or dispatched “special forces.” Yet, the NYT doesn’t describe those military operations as “invasions.” Nor does the newspaper of record condemn the Pindo government for violating international law, although in every instance in which Pindo forces cross into another country’s sovereign territory without permission from that government or the UNSC, that is technically an act of illegal aggression. In other words, the NYT applies a conscious double standard when reporting on the actions of Pindostan or one of its allies (note how Turkey’s recent invasion of Syria was just an “intervention”) as compared to how the NYT deals with actions by Pindo adversaries, such as Russia. The NYT’s reporting on Ukraine has been particularly dishonest and hypocritical. The NYT ignores the substantial evidence that the Pindo government encouraged and supported a coup that overthrew Yanukovych on Feb 22 2014, including a pre-coup intercepted phone call between Asst Sec State Victoria Nuland and Pindo Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who should lead the new government and how to “midwife this thing.”

The NYT also played down the key role of neo-Nazis and extreme nationalists in killing police before the coup, seizing government building during the coup, and then spearheading the slaughter of ethnic Russian Ukrainians after the coup. If you wanted to detect the role of these SS-wannabes from the NYT’s coverage, you’d have to scour the last few paragraphs of a few stories that dealt with other aspects of the Ukraine crisis. While leaving out the context, the NYT has repeatedly claimed that Russia “invaded” Crimea, although curiously without showing any photographs of an amphibious landing on Crimea’s coast or Russian tanks crashing across Ukraine’s border en route to Crimea or troops parachuting from the sky to seize strategic Crimean targets. The reason such evidence of an “invasion” was lacking is that Russian troops were already stationed in Crimea as part of a basing agreement for the port of Sevastopol. So, it was a very curious “invasion” indeed, since the Russian troops were on scene before the “invasion” and their involvement after the coup was peaceful in protecting the Crimean population from the depredations of the new regime’s neo-Nazis. The presence of a small number of Russian troops also allowed the Crimeans to vote on whether to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, which they did with a 96% majority. In the eastern provinces, which represented Yanukovych’s political base and where many Ukrainians opposed the coup, you can fault, if you wish, the Russian decision to provide some military equipment and possibly some special forces so ethnic Russian and other anti-coup Ukrainians could defend themselves from the assaults by the neo-Nazi Azov brigade and from the tanks and artillery of the coup-controlled Ukrainian army.

But an honest newspaper and honest columnists would insist on including this context. They also would resist pejorative phrases such as “invasion” and “aggression,” unless, of course, they applied the same terminology objectively to actions by the Pindosi government and its “allies.” That sort of nuance and balance is not what you get from the NYT and its “group-thinking” writers, people like Timothy Egan. When it comes to reporting on Russia, it’s Cold War-style propaganda, day in and day out. And this has not been a one-off problem. The unrelenting bias of the Times and, indeed, the rest of the mainstream Pindo news media on the Ukraine crisis represents a lack of professionalism that was also apparent in the pro-war coverage of the Iraq crisis in 2002-03 and other catastrophic Pindo foreign policy decisions. A growing public recognition of that mainstream bias explains why so much of the Pindosi population has tuned out supposedly “objective” news (because it is anything but objective). Indeed, those Pindosis who are more sophisticated about Russia and Ukraine than Timothy Egan know that they’re not getting the straight story from the NYT and other MSM outlets. Those not-dumbed-down Pindosis can spot government propaganda when they see it.

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rowan dot berkeley at gmail dot com

Tishby Torat ha-Ra

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